The Journey Begins.... With My Most Excellent Travel Karma

I'm writing to you from the Dublin airport, where we should not be spending many hours but alas, the family elected to bring me along and ergo they are stuck with my travel karma. Due to a ground stop in Dulles due to "severe weather" our flight landed in Dublin 40 mins late.

However, like the anti-Air Canada, Aer Lingus has been top notch. When we got to the customer service counter and told her we were on the Paris flight and missed it, she went and got a stack of new boarding passes that they had already printed for my family on the next Paris bound flight (3 hrs later). They also gave us "refreshment vouchers" which we promptly spent at Butlers Chocolate Cafe because.... who wouldn't. 3 chocolate croissants, a marshmallow hot chocolate, and a mocha later...... we're all pretty satiated. The marshmallow hot chocolate sent Charlotte to heaven because they put marshmallows in the bottom of the cup and poured molten chocolate all over it and then stirred in some frothed milk. It was a true thing of beauty, especially after a loooooong flight. (See: Travels With Snacks!)

Moving on - we will land in Paris 3 hrs later than planned but still plan to see the Louvre before meeting up with our dear, dear friends to kick off our weekend together.

Here's a few iphone shots because my Fuji is still stashed safely amongst my 3 jackets (layers, people!) in my backpack.

First up, our luggage spread as the Lyft driver stared at us wonderingly. 17 days of stuff in one roll-aboard per person. Not bad!

Next, all of us pre-flight, pre-ground stop, still naively happy:

This is a quick shot that is nowhere near as beautiful as it was in reality - landing in Dublin pretty early in the morning. It is some kind of weird to basically only have it be dark outside for a couple of hours on these trans-atlantic flights. The sun was brightly shining at what felt like midnight to us.

And here we are post-chocolate, waiting waiting waiting for our next flight. E's TJ sweatshirt already received notice :)

That's it for now. Primarily because some of us (cough cough CHARLOTTE) have run out of battery on our devices because we listened to Audible alllllllllllll flight. So we have to relocate. And find whatever adaptor one needs in Ireland. Which I probably don't have, because I'm supposed to be in France.